Quotes by Novelists - Page 63

If you're a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can't shut it off.
John Irving
Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which on hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum.
W Somerset Maugham
Modern scientific accomplishments" --a wealth of methods coupled with a poverty of intentions which, having nearly exhausted the hell-potential of the earth, move on now to the first frontier of the heavens.
Kenneth Patchen
For I believe that part of knowledge is its desire to show itself and its refusal to put up with a merely hidden existence. I find mute knowledge dangerous, for it grows ever more mute and ultimately secret, and must then avenge itself for being secret.
Elias Canetti
Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of his brown arm lightly covered with fine hairs. The sun shone goldly upon them. Something in Isabel's immobility attracted my attention, and I glanced at her. She was so still that you might have thought her hypnotized. Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate, but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence as I saw then on hers. It was a mask of lust. I would never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such unbridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human. The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made her hideous and frightening. It horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick.
W Somerset Maugham
The Bishop blessed him and helped him to his feet."May God have mercy on you," he said. And erased him from his heart.
Gabriel García Márquez
Don't make fun of people who are different. Unless they have more money and influence. Then you must
Tim Dorsey
Can a man still be brave if he's afraid? That's the only tine a man can be brave.
George R.R. Martin
When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds
Niall Williams
A sword needs a sheath, heh, and a wedding needs a bedding.
George R.R. Martin
Fucking is not an adequate name for what we just did there,' Irene said. 'We need a better word. Something more festive.''Fucktivities?' he offered.'Celebratio,' she said.'Funnilingus!
Daryl Gregory
Oh, pity the poor gluttonWhose troubles all beginIn struggling on and on to turnWhat's out into what's in.
Walter de la Mare
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.
Chinua Achebe
Bring a torch, if you've got one. It's as dark as hell and stinks of something far worse than cheese.
Anthony Powell
Yea, she hath passed hereby, and blessed the sheaves,And the great garths, and stacks, and quiet farms,And all the tawny, and the crimson leaves.Yea, she hath passed with poppies in her arms,Under the star of dusk, through stealing mist,And blessed the earth, and gone, while no man wist.With slow, reluctant feet, and weary eyes,And eye-lids heavy with the coming sleep,With small breasts lifted up in stress of sighs,She passed, as shadows pass, among the sheep;While the earth dreamed, and only I was wareOf that faint fragrance blown from her soft hair.The land lay steeped in peace of silent dreams;There was no sound amid the sacred boughs.Nor any mournful music in her streams:Only I saw the shadow on her brows,Only I knew her for the yearly slain,And wept, and weep until she come again.
Frederic Manning
Waiting turns men into bears in a barn, and women into cats in a sack.
Robert Jordan
Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life.
May Sarton
He clung to the story as to a vow whose abandonment might bring down on his head all kinds of grief and misfortune. He felt very alone, on an interminable day full of evil omens, and the story, though resistant to some of his intentions, was at least a testimony to reality and coherence
José María Merino
an English girl might well believethat time is how you spend your love.
Nick Laird
We were on Barrow Street now."Who is the man with the scar?" I said.She shot me a glance, and her face hardened. "You saw him?""How could I miss? He was the real center of attention. Didn't you go to the opening at all?""No" She said. "And just because you saw him doesn't mean he was there.
Nicholas Christopher
Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of 'Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
Ayn Rand
Perhaps I cannot make my people good, she told herself, but I should at least try to make them a little less bad.
George R.R. Martin
The full-grown modern human being ... is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment... when he is consumed in the service of an idea in the conquest of the goal pursued.
R. Briffault
But men often mistake killing and revenge for justice. They seldom have the stomach for justice.
Robert Jordan
But where is my son? Where is the beautiful Miss Merriot?
Georgette Heyer
Miss Abigail, I want to be an author because writers know when a person is lonely. I mean, when Molly read me some books, those writers reached out and said, Look Gideon, we know about your loneliness and we know you're feeling downtrodden. And they said...I'll stand up for you. You're not lone anymore.
Leon Uris
And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us.I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness.
Anne Rice
She forgot: it was as simple as that. She just loved being with the guy. Possibly enough that not even their own wedding could screw it up.
Tim Farrington
You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
Lawrence Durrell
There is lust and then there is love. They are related, but still very different things. To indulge in one requires little but honeyed speech and a change of clothes; to obtain the other, by contrast, a man must give up his rib. In return, his woman will undo the sin of Eve, and bring him back into Paradise.
Anne Fortier
Do you know how I picture God myself?" he said. "As an enormous, creative organ beyond our ken, who scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates because it is His function as God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing and is stupidly prolific in His work and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds which are produced by His scattered germs.
Guy de Maupassant
Peril-ridden and fragile, the imperfect human body, what a shameful thing it was!
Kenzaburō Ōe
I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.
Leonard Cohen
Many a man has been ashamed of his wicked attempts, when he has been repulsed, that would never have been ashamed of them, had he succeeded.
Samuel Richardson
Excellence costs a great deal.
May Sarton
I think I am at that stage of Life now where Success or Failure, nothing Bothers me. If I get little success then I get lots of rejections and failures on a regular basis too. But none of that bothers me at all. I can take failure as sportingly without getting bothered as I take success. And this is how my life has drastically changed in last one year or something. I don't do things anymore to please people around me and all I care about is If I am happy being where I am and I am enjoying doing what I am doing or not. I may not be where I want to be yet but I am Happy.This is what matters in Life. Isn't it? Find what you love. Sooner or Later but you need to find one day, and once you find, give your everything to it. There may be many failures and rejections on the way but you will reach where you want to be some day and most importantly, you will be happy and in Peace with where you are.
Shivam Singh
The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides
Kim Stanley Robinson
I have often been charged with falsehood and hypocrisy, yet there lives not the man who would more gladly than I speak truthfully and lay bare his heart; but as I have not one idea, one feeling in common with the people who surround me, as the very first word I should speak truthfully would cause a general hue and cry, I have preferred to keep silent, or, if I do speak, to utter only stupid commonplaces which everyone has agreed to believe in.
Théophile Gautier
This seems to me absolutely one of the quintessential things about the human condition. It’s what actually distinguishes man from any other animal: living with those who have lived and the companionship of those who are no longer alive. Not necessarily the people that one knew personally, I mean the people perhaps whom one only knows by what they did, or what they left behind, this question of the company of the past, that’s what interests me, and archives are a kind of site in the sense of like an archaeological site.
John Berger
Who said, 'All Time's delightHath she for narrow bed;Life's troubled bubble broken'? ---That's what I said.
Walter de la Mare
So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.
Andrew Sean Greer
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last forever outlast the sea the earth and all men.
Joseph Conrad
Kurti had believed in politics, and politics had deceived him, the way politics deceives everyone.
Imre Kertész
What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governm
Guy de Maupassant
She went to the window seat and sat there, sniffling, hating them all, and herself most of all. It was all her fault, everything bad that had happened.
George R.R. Martin
He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
William Golding
Believe me, it is quite unnecessary! I neither know nor care what it cost to redeem Lufra—and if you badger me on this very boring matter I shall not invite you to go with me when I try out my new team!”There was a moment’s tense silence; then Jessamy raised his eyes, no longer glowing, but uncomfortably austere. “Very well, sir,” he said quietly. “Will you tell me, if you please, what I owe you?”“No, young Stiff-rump! I will not!
Georgette Heyer
I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool.
W Somerset Maugham
Was there ever a war where only one side bled?
George R.R. Martin
God didn't make Eve from Adam's rib. He took out half of Adam's brain by accident.
Shirley Jump
Then one day a thought clicked my mind... and even theweirdest event in the past start Making complete sense...
shivangi lavaniya
The yard consisted of grass and a Russian Olive tree, which was about the only kind of tree able to survive on the high prairies. Its thin, grey leaves made it look as though it were on the verge of dying, thereby fooling the elements and the bad weather into thinking that they didn't have to bother with something so spindly and bent, something so obviously on its last legs.
Thomas King
He would not object, he said, to accepting a post as a librarian. But as Cecilia was unable to imagine that her father or her brother would feel any marked degree of satisfaction in giving her in marriage to a librarian, this very handsome concession on Mr Fawnhope's part merely added to her despondency.
Georgette Heyer
Destiny is the music of the improbable. Were it otherwise, almost anyone could exist.
Kenneth Patchen
Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
John Hersey
I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I’ve always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I’ve always recognized it at once—and it’s the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.
Ayn Rand
His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or a piece of wood with a dandelion helmet, perhaps; but above all they require only the pure, strong, passionate, chaste, still-untroubled fantasy of those happy years when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us, when we are allowed to see, hear, laugh, wonder, and dream without the world's demanding anything in return, when the impatience of those whom we want so much to love has not yet begun to torment us for evidence, some early token, that we will diligently fulfill our duties. Ah, it will not be long, and all that will rain down upon us in overwhelming, raw power, will assault us, stretch us, cramp us, drill us, corrupt us.
Thomas Mann
There are some griefs so loudThey could bring down the sky,And there are griefs so stillNone knows how deep they lie,Endured, never expended.There are old griefs so proudThey never speak a word;They never can be mended.And these nourish the willAnd keep it iron-hard.
May Sarton
Every piece of that marvelous world was a silent tear.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón